Vurt

I LOVED this book. It's unlike any other science fiction book...or any book for that matter...that I've ever read. Jeff Noon writes in such a way that whether you want to be or not, you're swept up in the book's quick pace. It's fun...like a chocolate sunday (okay I am a girl!)... and it's deliciously weird. It take a few pages to get in tune with his way of writing, which is part of the fun, and when you do it's a roller coaster ride. I didn't want it to end! Not only is it fun, but actually has a really interesting plot and keeps you guessing till the end. I would highly recommend it! :)

Noon catapults the reader into world in which the boundaries between dreams and reality have collapsed. The unreal becomes more real than the real. A hypnotizing adventure, I read it in a single spellbound sitting. I cannot recommend this book enough. Inspired.

"A young boy puts a feather into his mouth..."From the first sentence of the book, I was drawn in. I forced myself to read only one chapter at a time, to actually consider what I'd read and let it sink in, and that made this book that much richer. To me, it heralded back to Clockwork Orange. The Stash Riders (made up of Scribble, Beetle, Mandy, and Bridget) have their own vocabulary grown from the world they inhabit - where feathers can hold their fondest dreams or worst nightmares, where the worst poison comes from dreamsnakes, where pure is poor, and where shadowcops lurk above every all-night Vurt-U-Want.Scribble is a young man, not so out of the ordinary, who wants nothing more than to have his sister back again. That want drives him to a destiny he'd not even considered, gaining and losing almost everything in the process.I'm enamoured with this book. It stays on my nightstand so I can hear Scribble tell his story whenever I want. Let Jeff Noon take you into his tangibly ethereal world.

Vurt is unique.The more you read,the more original it gets.It starts off like some crappy cheap cyberpunk book-a bunch of sterotypes robbing a drugstore,but soon turns into an incredibly original maelstrom of twisted events fluxing in and out of a cyber-plethoric orgy of reality and dream world.It's towards the end,where you really learn of the relationship between the main hero and his sister,that the reader is blown away.It still leaves an infintude of questions relating to the operations of the vurt and the characters,of which the answers are constantly hinted at in his other books.I'm not suprised it won the Arthur C.Clarke award!

Vurt, by Jeff Noon is one of the most creative books that I have read in the sf & f world. It seems almost like a combo of A Clockwork Orange (the way Jeff Noon invents words, deriving them from words already in existance; also the all night Vurt-You-Want is analagous to the Korova Milkbar), Neuromancer (the general style of writing, cyberpunk theme), and Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland (the sort of mysticism that surrounds the plot, how a child is chasing down something that seems trivial to others, how he encounters a strage and almost magical world, paralelling to reality), and finally of Tekwar (the theme deals with the solicitation of drugs that don't exist in the non fiction world, and the battling that goes along with them). The plotline is very simple when you strip it of detail, which is part of why it becomes such an intriguinging, such a simple plotline bears such a complex plot. I think that Jeff Noon did a commendable job on his first book, and look ! forward to reading more books by him.